The “Master Painters of India” Tell Their Ancient Stories

The Met's Medieval Miniatures Mix Religion, Royalty, and Remarkable Detail

The story of Hindu and Muslim art had once been fairly simple. Hindu art illustrated the stories of the Bhagavad Gita and its hero, Krishna. Islamic art banned images of God or the Prophet. Thus, it developed elaborate designs and renderings of animals and nature.

            Eventually, the Hindu and Muslim approaches to art crossed paths in a very big way in India, as a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art vividly illustrates. The exhibit of about 220 works by 40 artists—nearly all “miniatures” done in ink or watercolor—covers almost a millennium, from 1100–1900 C.E. Given India’s history, it also illustrates how wars of empires and religions fueled happier wars between artistic styles.
            At first blush, the average visitor to the exhibition, “Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India,” will see the works as akin to medieval Europe’s illuminated manuscripts: small bright pictures that accompany texts. This medieval-to-modern period of art in India had patronage from Hindu and Muslim courts and, similarly, the patrons wanted small works of art in books or as visual delicacies. The earliest works of this period were done on palm leaf, moving to paper and, for this exhibition, ending in photography, which migrated to India by the end of the 1800s.
            The novelty of this exhibit—emphasized by its scholars and the many enthusiastic reviews—is that it kills off an old notion about medieval Indian art. The old belief was that paintings were done by anonymous members of court schools. However, since the 1990s, the new approach to Indian art has been to track down actually artists, as if named Renaissance figures, who in their day were the most accomplished painters, indeed famous in India's cultural circles.
            In the words of the curators, the exhibit “counters the long-held view of the anonymity of Indian art.” The Indian emperors knew who these individuals were and sometimes included their names in royal histories. Others were just called the “master” of a court. Some emperors called their top painter the “wonder of the age,” and hence the exhibition title.
            Around the world, the modern scholars of these exhibited Indian miniatures (works brought in from India, England, and the U.S.) have been finding enough clues—in texts or hints on the paintings—to name names of the artists. This is very new. According to the show’s curators, for the first time they have been able to “reveal the identities of individual artists and their oeuvres through an analysis of style.”
            That style also reflects the turmoil of India’s long-ago history (begun among Hindus, then “invaded” by Muslims, Mongols, and the British). It was a history of oscillations. Once an ancient ruler expanded an empire here, and then over there it broke into parts, either as Hindu kingdoms or Islamic Sultanates. This was complicated further by the invasion of the Mongols. As rulers they tended to adopt the religion of the population. Similarly, a Muslim Sultan often had a Hindu wife. Religions mixed.
            As regards art, the first significant stylistic influx to act on the native  approaches—Buddhist and Hindu storytelling mostly—came from Persia, with its ornate patterning and naturalistic rendering. Then the Europeans came by ship (around 1500), followed by the East India Company (1600). European topics and styles were imitated by the Indian court painters.
            Through it all, however, the dominant Indian characteristic was the small narrative painting illustrated, inch by inch, with sharp, colorful detail. The artists also experimented with flat space and perspective, creating a kind of Indian “cubism” in which several views or senses of dimension and depth can be evoked in a single tableau.
            If at first the sources of the new styles were the Hindu schools of north India, the later Sultanates, and the still later a renaissance in the Hindu courts (1650-1730), a new wave came with the East India Company. Its commercial concern produced a “Company School” style of painting, still of the highest quality. Indian art always liked detail. So when photography arrived, the clash was head on: what is more detailed than photo crystals? The result was a strong Indian court trend in color-tined photographs, as illustrated by the exhibition.
            Two brother artists were at the crux of this collision of painting and technology. One tried to outdo photography by painting a traditional  “miniature” that was five feet long, a veritable mural. The other brother opted for professional photography. Thus, a period of Indian art and its “wonder of the age” artists came to an end.
            Our knowledge of who these artists were, however, has just begun. Their names will boggle American minds: Farrukh Beg, Balchand, Pahari, and Chitarman, to name just a few of the forty who scholars have now identified “according to identifiable hands.” The exhibit has four or five works by each of these “master painters of India.” It may be by their “identifiable hands” (and not by their difficult names) that we can try to go back and meet these Indian masters, once faceless, as individuals who excelled at their meticulouis craft.